- Apr 2, 2011
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Unintentionally crossed easterns with standard and BB bronze years ago, results took us on that traditional heritage breed color variation odyssey that we just shamefully believed was our poor breeding habits of letting our flock free range and breed by choice, hen to tom each year. Never enough money for fencing to isolate breeds, ages, needy individuals and other livestock like quail, chickens, undesired roosters, and 4 pens of goats. We love our resultant Narragansett turkeys, our Royal Palm and other variations now present of what we had to sell off last year, but what I want to know: our first birds that exhibitted white plumage had blue eyes in a bright sky to light turquoise blue, that in adulthood would shade down to a blue hazel greyish hue. we do not get that bright, clear blue now in our silver and buff and red palm, narragansetts and bronze crosses, but do still get a hazel grey-blue in some of them and all of the white base colors. Has anyone else had this occur and did we blow an opportunity to pursue a fabulous, rare genetic trait in heritage breed turkeys with blue eyes? I am trying this year to carve out a fund dedicated to recapture that blend of what we believe we had genetic crosses of in our early turkey purchases, that the sellers did not know what they were selling us and we did not know until years later that all was not as stated. Am I throwing money to the wind to try to blindly follow suspicions of genetic makeup, to redo the original crosses to get blue eyes again? we have no way to go back and get the same birds from the same seller, nor did he even know what he had. I have not found any other heritage turkey breeders mentioning blue eyes in their royal palm and white based heritage birds.
mari
mari
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